Guest post: We have achievements we can show you youngsters

I’m afraid my first reaction to some of these spoutings is to ask, “Which man told you to say that?”

That isn’t always justified. In fact I don’t often say it but the thought recurs and sometimes it is needed. There are too many people about who can be catapulted straight into apoplexy by my saying, “Yes, I remember that. In the early ‘80s I was spearheading the campaign at work to get an evidence-based job evaluation scheme introduced which looked only at what work you did, what knowledge you had had to gain and left out entirely matters of sex, race, class.” The previous model, such as it was, had paid far too much attention to where you were seen to be in some social hierarchy. We got there in the end, not solely down to me, as once we had the agreement in principle I stepped back and a new team took over to slog through the technicalities and the resistance of a few fairly useless managers who were going to lose their place at the top table.

Feminism has always been about race and class, as well as gender equality. Some of the great classics come out of the USA and they acknowledge that. An entirely different angle comes out of France, though I’ve read less of that because so little of it was published in English and my French is a bit dodgy.

In contrast, much of what we are now hassled with seems to pop out of the spiel of political illiterates, float across the Atlantic on a raft of discarded plastic and pop straight out of the mouths of those who have not yet engaged their brains.

It’s the old, old story – whether it was Marx who first said it or not – if you don’t learn your history you are doomed to repeat it. A far better idea would be to learn first, speak later.

A modest suggestion – try Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex. You won’t like it. You certainly won’t agree with it: I don’t now either but I’m bloody glad I read it before I allowed my brain to be set in a couple of concrete cliches. An easier read is Norris and Liddington, One Hand Tied Behind us (the copy I have is Virago) but you need to know that too. Jill Liddington lives a couple of miles up the hill from me, technically retired but still at it. She’ll probably go on doing feminism her way, as will all us second wavers, until she drops.

Why should we not? We have achievements we can show you youngsters. We have proof that it works.

2 Responses to “Guest post: We have achievements we can show you youngsters”

We have achievements we can show you youngsters. We have proof that it works.

And they do need to be shown; whenever I tell young people what life was like for women even a couple of decades before they were born, they don’t believe me that it could ever have been that bad – and they don’t think that there is the slightest chance that the rights they now have could be taken away if we stop paying attention.

Yes, there was an underground railroad to get women who needed abortions to California or New York. Now there are seven states with only one clinic that’ll do abortions … and no underground railroad.

Yes, they’d ask whether you could type when you were applying for an architect’s job. Now they just search your social media and don’t even let you in the building.

Yes, the pay was about 66 cents on the dollar, and now it’s closer to 75 cents. Or even 80. That’s a real improvement.

And then there’s a big area where things now seem worse. Teaching college means mingling with loads of young women, some of whom wind up with crises and ask for help. From that kind of experience, it sure seems like you can’t get within ten feet of young het men these days without a full background check. The *majority* seem to be creepy porn-soaked pervs at this point. In the high and far off times, those were a small minority. The majority might have been all kinds of inept, but they meant well.

The poisoning of people’s love lives, on the background of so few major other improvements, makes me want to say, “Zomg. You have it so bad now” ….